You’re not supposed to fall in love and that be the end of things. When you fall in love proper, you don’t stop falling. Every day is a chance to find something new, to be with a new part of another human and to find out how that makes you feel. Perhaps today’s the day you find out that a person dislikes kale, even if it’s deep fried. Or that caterpillars can make someone scream into a previously unknown octave when discovered secreting away in a sleeping bag. Perhaps you see their face in nothing but star light and make a mental note to find more excuses to spend naked under a cloudless sky, or maybe you are laughing your head off as someone shows you just how inept a person can be at driving a stick shift.

But those are all happy discoveries, and that’s not what’s always going to happen. You will find yourself running 35 minutes late to work because someone lost your keys after a night out drinking with some old college friends, and you will be cursing every red light and slow driver in the left lane and you will come home, still fuming, looking for a fight because you need to let some rage out. The dishes will be unwashed and the blankets on the couch will be spread out everywhere and you will notice that the lamp in the corner has been on since yesterday and will ask if they think electricity is free, and you will end up sleeping alone that night, staring at your phone waiting for them to call and apologize. Instead, you’ll see pictures of them going out again, laughing and smiling with those same old shitty friends, and you end up creeping through old photos they have online, which is never a good idea. You’ll see the person you love in some photo from the past, kissing on someone that isn’t you. Of course, you were aware of the past, but it still stings in the here and now. You know it shouldn’t bother you, but it does, so you bring up how awful that picture looks, how stupid that past was, and before you know it, you’re unleashing an all out attack on their history. It’s not fair, but right now, nothing else matters but the pain in your chest. Nobody can change the past, but you demand a place in that history. Everything hurts so much, and all because you wish you could have been a part of their everything. It’s petty and stupid, and you know it, but that doesn’t stop you or the snide remarks, the arrogant tone of voice, the pointed comments that are alluding to someone’s past as being awful, as if every moment before you was a mistake. But somewhere, in all of that anger, is the pale heart of somebody who just wants to be loved.

This isn’t a movie, and you aren’t sure what would make you feel okay, so you just want something, anything… You just need something to get you through this moment. But it’s precisely in those moments, when doubt has invaded your everything, that you’ll have to answer the one question you’ve been trying your best to avoid…